Italians are going to clean up their country, together with Cyprus, El Salvador, Argentina and Romania

This weekend the citizens of five different countries are going to take initiative in order to make a change in their living environment by collecting illegal waste. The civic-led clean actions will take place in Cyprus, Italy, El Salvador (San Salvador), Argentina (Buenos Aires) and Romania (Timis).

One of the most popular tourist destinations in the Mediterranean region, Cyprus, is preparing for the island-wide cleanup day on the 29th of September. Ioana Lucia Son, one of the leaders for the Let’s Do It Cyprus! action, says that so far around 3200 volunteers have shown their interest in participating in the massive cleanup. Around 200 waste piles, looking to get picked up by volunteers, have been already mapped in 5 different regions of Cyprus: Nicosia, Limassol, Larnaca, Famagusta and Paphos. “The project touches utterly important issues for Cyprus that involve finding solutions to eliminate the waste problems and trying to change people’s mentality regarding waste management, environmental protection and its influence in our everyday life,” Ioana explains.

At the same time volunteers are also gearing up for an action in Romania’s largest county called Timis. An organizing civic-group is hoping that around 5000 people will join the cleanup effort on the 29th of September, to collect around 100 to 150 tons of garbage. This is by far not a first effort for Romania, as on 24th of September last year, organizers managed to unite the efforts of 250 000 Romanians to cleanup up waste all over the country. This year, on 12th of May the volunteer team repeated their gigantic effort and united 180 000 fellow citizens for a day of cleaning. Radu Rusu, the coordinator of Let's Do It, Timis!, claims that all the previous efforts have not been in vain - with every campaign the city authorities taken more and more actions in order to make their cities clean permanently. “We have an important role in implementing the ecological education plan in schools and promoting the 3R concept (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) and the selective waste collection system among people in Timis.”

Italian organization Legambiente, will be organizing a massive cleanup action named “Puliamo Il Mondo” from 28th until 30th of September across Italy. The organizers will be waiting for over half a million volunteers to take part in the cleaning, while more than 100 local partner organizations will be coordinating the action on a local level.

World Cleanup 2012 effort will touch this weekend also Argentina and El Salvador. In Argentina active local group named “Vamos A Hacerlo Argentina” will lead a cleanup in Buenos Aires on 29th of September. El Salvador is engaging the youth and focusing their efforts towards their capital San Salvador at the same day - around 160 volunteers from schools and universities will be collecting trash from the streets and gathering it from the car drivers, in order to raise local awareness about the littering problem.

All these cleanups take place as a part of a global movement Let’s Do It! organizing this year a global civic effort called World Cleanup 2012 - the world's biggest environmental and social inclusion project that unites people from 96 countries on all the continents, under the same goal - to raise awareness, to promote actions and efforts leading to ecologically responsible living locally and globally.

World Cleanup 2012 is supported by Skype, Outfit7, Estonian Air, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group and Estonian Ministry of the Environment.